


in the wake of a mountain's shadow

by odoridango



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection, character backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 00:49:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4685933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leave us alone, Tobio wants to say.</p><p> </p><p>An exploration of Kageyama family life through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the wake of a mountain's shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Baby's first Haikyuu fic! Mostly I am just too invested in Kageyama's family and am very curious about it. Don't think I've quite locked in his character yet, but I hope it's enjoyable anyway.

_Leave us alone_ , is what Tobio wants to say.

“Kageyama-kun, does your mother not make your bento?” his preschool teacher asks him, strained and sweet. He hates it.

He looks at her, frowning. He looks down onto the table, at his bento, half of it taken up by rice, two of his favorite tamagoyaki tucked neatly in a corner, a bit of seaweed salad piled next to it, spilling into yesterday’s soboro, topped with furikake. It’s not the fancy octopus and crab shaped hot dogs that his classmates get, or the cute rice animals and cheery nori messages, and there aren’t any little dividers and brightly colored cups and compartments. But he doesn’t mind it. He doesn’t need it.

He pops one of the tamagoyaki in his mouth, chewing slowly, staring at his teacher all the while. “Of course she does,” he says plainly. “I’m not allowed near stoves right? That’s what you told us last week, sensei. Why would you ask me that?”

Her face gets all funny. His teacher is always like this, picking on and on about his bento, or about his grades, always wanting to make home visits and talk to his mother, mouth pinched to the side.

He knows what she’s thinking. It’s the same thing that makes him think of the calls his mother’s mom makes to their apartment late at night, yelling into the receiver so loud that he can hear her calling his mother irresponsible, and careless, and his mother is strong so she is calm, she says nothing, but afterwards she always looks so tired, and he hurries to sneak back to his room in time for when she comes to tuck him in.

“My Tobi,” she says, strokes a gentle hand across his head, runs her fingers down his cheek. She tugs up the comforter over his shoulders, smooths down the cover.

“She’s wrong,” Tobio tells her, because he can’t help it. “You take care of me. You don’t have a lot of time but you always take care of me. They’re all wrong.”

He holds on tight to her hand because she looks like she’s about to cry, and she’s warm when she leans forward and presses a kiss to the side of his head, hugging him close and sighing shakily.

“My dear Tobio,” she says.

 _Leave us alone_ , he thinks, watching his neighbors approach his mother over and over with those stupid little black folders with the pictures of the stupid suited men in them, and his mom’s mom (“She’s your grandmother, Tobio,” his mother always scolds) calls about it too, and he always hides in his room when he sees his mom’s mom visit, because she’s always bringing stacks of those folders, talking about how his mom is only a couple years away from 30, saying, Think about Tobio, Think about Tobio.

“Why don’t you ever say hello to Grandma, Tobi?” his mother asks him, as they have a small Sunday tea time with the kasutera his mom’s mom brought.

“I don’t like her,” he says, and eats a bit of his kasutera, feeling a little like he’s won. “She’s always saying, think about Tobio, but she never asks what _I_ think.”

This is what Tobio thinks. He doesn’t see his mother often, because she works a lot, so she can make a lot of money to take care of him. She pays a minder to take him home from school and stay with him in the evenings, and buys their groceries at the market in the city before she comes home at night. She takes his teachers’ home visits, and even though he’s not doing well in school, she never yells at him, just lets him huddle close guiltily, lets him find the words to tell her that he doesn’t like the other kids who are too afraid to make fun of him, that he’s not interested in the games he thinks are silly, that it’s hard for him to concentrate on things he doesn’t really have interest in. She always makes enough food to last him through the week, so he never has to go to the konbini, though she does sometimes. She always checks in on him when she comes home, she tucks him in, she watches movies with him, and she’s always apologizing to him when he’s not looking, and while he’s never seen her cry, he can hear her sometimes, at night.

He loves his mother, and he knows his mother loves him too, even though no one else seems to understand.

“Your father you know, he was a friend, and we were together sometimes because we were lonely,” she tells him, cuddled close on the couch, holding up a photo album. Tobio’s father is a normal looking man, with straight hair cut short and close to his head, with a handsome smile. He seems a bit rugged. “And one day we just weren’t careful enough, and that’s how I had you. I don’t think it’s right to not tell you, Tobi, and maybe you’ll want to know him better one day.”

“Mom, why isn’t he helping you?” Tobio says, jabbing a pudgy finger at his father’s face, looking up at his mother with a scowl. “Aren’t you mad?”

“I’m mad,” she says. “He’s barely talked to me since I told him I was having you. But he usually does send us money every month.” She smiles at Tobio, and it’s the same kind of smile that people tell him is scary on him. “I’ve never used it.”

Tobio smiles back. “You’re awesome and I’m gonna win Nationals for you one day,” he says, “And he’ll be sorry.”

He’s no good at grades and it eats at him a little bit, but he is good at volleyball. His mother started him on summer camps to make sure he isn’t bored at home during vacation, and they had spent several nights after dinner together, looking at the pamphlets and choosing the ones Tobio liked. Tobio knows he isn’t allowed to fight or hit or kick people, and he learned his lesson the first time when a boy tried to bully him and Tobio smashed a rock in his face. His mother got called to the office. He doesn’t want to bother his mom like that.

But spiking a volleyball is okay. The red stinging of his palms is relieving somehow, and it’s nice to be praised for something for once, instead of being an excuse, or being told he’s not going to get anywhere, or that he’s stupid. Volleyball makes him feel good. Setting especially, makes him feel good. A setter is important. A setter ties together a team. He wants to be like that, one day. He wants to support.

His mother presents him with a volleyball on his sixth birthday, and a small book on tips for setters. He’s ecstatic, and when he stumbles on the kanji he doesn’t know, he gathers them up until he has enough to go to his mother for on the weekend, to watch her break out the ink sticks and the rice paper and the long tapered brushes to teach him, stroke by stroke, the words that he doesn’t know. His mother’s shodo is beautiful, and her quick, smooth brushwork is an inspiration, and she praises him even though he still drips ink everywhere and has troubles with his stroke control. He’s kept every word she ever wrote for him neatly in a cardboard box in his closet.

He promised her he’d win Nationals for her one day, so that’s what he’ll do. He can’t promise her the glory of Toudai or Keio, the way other children could, because he’s not very smart, and he’ll never be smart. But he’ll be fast and sleek and strong like her, and he’ll make his sets like her brushwork, fast and straight and true. Most importantly, it’ll be controlled. He’ll be in control. He’ll be the support. And he’ll take his team to Nationals.

He’s lonely, of course, because people run away from him and his mother’s sharp smiles, and because they don’t understand why he practices so hard, why he doesn’t invest his time in cram school or other hobbies. But they’ve never understood, and it feels like just another thing he’s resigned himself to. His classmates think he’s stupid and moody, and when he tries to talk to them he gets tongue-tied and doesn’t know what to say. When he talks about volleyball they think he’s strange, too loud and too excited.

But middle school will be something different. And he knows this when he sees Oikawa-senpai serve for the first time. Tobio will make his mark here. He’ll learn from Oikawa-senpai, and he’ll become the kind of player that can take his team anywhere. They call him a genius, but that doesn’t mean anything to him. Geniuses are people who are gifted, who can get high grades and understand Basho and Natsume Soseki. Tobio can’t do any of that. He needs to work hard.

When he sees the look of fury on Oikawa-senpai’s face, he can’t understand it at first. It’s only when Iwaizumi-senpai steps in and pulls Oikawa-senpai away, that he understands, only vaguely, what’s been happening. It doesn’t matter if his sets are becoming better. It doesn’t matter if they’re thinking of making him a setter on the regular roster. If only in a roundabout, strange way, he knows that he’s being hated. And middle school isn’t something different, not in the way he hopes it to be. People don’t understand him. He doesn’t understand them. He talks, but they don’t listen. He says, “Hit my toss, I know you can do better than that,” and he’s trying to say, I’ll bring this team to the top, as long as you’ll work hard and I know you can do it, I know you can put more effort in.

 _Leave us alone_ , he used to think, and now they have.

Three months before his team abandoned him, he met his father. They met at a family restaurant in one of the downtown shopping districts, far enough away that he and his mother had to take the metro. Tobio couldn’t bring himself to order the curry, and got himself a gyuudon combo set B instead. His father wasn’t as tall as his mother, and seemed quite plain at first glance. He seemed pretty fashionable, in a t-shirt and cardigan that hung off his frame well.

“How’s Hibi?” he asked.

“You should ask her that,” Tobio said brusquely.

His father chuckled a bit, tired. “I will,” he said. “You’re a lot like her. Your straightforwardness is the same.”

Tobio said nothing, just drank his miso soup. His father had ordered numerous side dishes, and was picking them off one by one. Nasu dengaku. Agedashi tofu. Chawanmushi. Even daigaku imo.

He learned a couple things. His father’s name was Namitani Aki. He was a photographer, a freelancer, contracted to several different magazines. He had met Tobio’s mother in high school, but didn’t really get to know her until college. He would be meeting her later, since Tobio and his mother thought it would be better to meet him separately.

“Why didn’t you help?” Tobio asked, as the check was taken away. “Why didn’t you come back?” There wasn’t much he wanted to say. There wasn’t much he wanted to know. There was just this.

“I was scared,” Namitani Aki said. “And I didn’t know what to do.” He didn’t make excuses, or try to say that he regret it now. He didn’t make apologies. Namitani Aki seemed rather straightforward himself.

So Tobio, quite suddenly, remembers Namitani Aki when he thinks about the ball that no one would hit, when he goes to practice like a wind-up doll and lets the back-up setter take his place. His mother doesn’t really know what’s happened, and it’s surprising to know that now there are things that she doesn’t know about him, that even unintentionally, they’ve grown a bit apart. But he lets her sit him down with her, let her teach him what to do to help with some of the work she does freelance now, and he’s not very smart but this is easy, just adding and subtracting and knowing when or when not to add or deduct tax. It makes sense. It’s practical. He hears her calling a friend called Shiori, talking to her about him, about how sometimes he feels a bit distant and she doesn’t quite know how to reach him. That sometimes she thinks he’s limiting himself to the narrow set of guidelines that he set for himself, that distinguishes between the gifted and the normal.

His mother says, “I don’t know what I would do without you,” says, “You’re a gem, you know that?”

Tobio wonders if his mother has a girlfriend, and if she’ll ever introduce her to him. His mother has never given up on the things she loves, not on him, not on her job, not on her shodo. Not on love, either. He loves volleyball. He said he would win Nationals for her once, but he wants to win for himself just as much. Maybe he should follow her example. He doesn’t know how to change, or what to change, because he’s never learned how to make friends, how to support the way a setter should, how not to clutch onto volleyball and learn his control there, but surely, surely there must be a way.

He tests for Shiratorizawa, even though he doesn’t think he’ll make the cut, and his sports repute must surely be trashed from what happened at Kitagawa Daiichi, but there’s another way. There’s a school, named Karasuno, with a strict coach, one hard to tolerate. If he can help the team there, if he can endure and learn there, if he can understand beyond perseverance and guidance but also what he’s missing there, what is it that he can’t understand about people, what people can’t understand about him, surely.

Surely, he can change.


End file.
